Power and energy consumption have become a critical issue for data centers, with the rise in energy costs, supply and demand of energy and the proliferation of power hungry information and communication technology (ICT) equipment. Data centers consume approximately two percent (%) of all electricity globally or 183 billion kilowatt (KW) hrs of power, and this consumption is growing at a rate of 12% each year. Energy efficiency now is becoming a critical operational parameter for data center managers for a number of key reasons, including the cost of power is rising, the demand for power is increasing, access to power from the power grid is becoming an issue for many data centers, energy usage creates excessive heat loads within the data center, awareness of green technologies and carbon footprint impact and the introduction of industry-wide codes of conducts and legislation for green information technology (IT).
In a typical data center, power usage can be broken down into power used for the operation of the ICT equipment and power required for infrastructure (such as chillers, humidifiers, air conditioning units (ACUs), power distribution units (PDUs), uninterruptable power supplies (UPS), lights and power distribution equipment). For example, after losses due to power production and delivery and losses due to cooling requirements, only about 15% of the power supplied to a data center is used for IT/computation, the rest is overhead. See, also, P. Scheihing, “Creating Energy-Efficient Data Centers,” Data Center Facilities and Engineering Conference, Washington, D.C. (May 18, 2007), the contents of which are incorporated by reference herein.
Therefore, techniques for improving data center energy efficiency would be desirable.